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South Carolina

Personhood USA, the group that has pushed fetal personhood measures in states including Colorado, Mississippi and North Dakota, told supporters in an email today that its next target will be South Carolina.

The group’s president, Keith Mason, boasted to supporters of the “victory” of a nonbinding resolution supporting a personhood amendment on last year’s Republican primary ballot in South Carolina. He did not specify if the group will be advocating for a state-level ballot initiative or a legislative approach, or both. A personhood amendment currently pending in the state legislature is sponsored by Lee Bright, who was a Tea Party-supported U.S. Senate candidate in 2014.

The recent failures of state-level personhood measures led former Personhood USA official Gualberto Garcia Jones to declare last year that the strategy was “dead for now.” Evidently, Mason disagrees.

Right now, Friend, we need your help to publicly launch our South Carolina initiative.

We've identified 250,000 pro-life voters in South Carolina that we want to activate to support personhood, and vote in upcoming primaries and elections.

This initiative follows on the heels of a personhood victory this summer, in which 79% of South Carolina GOP primary voters called for a personhood amendment to the state constitution. Right now, there's personhood legislation in the state legislature that needs our support!

South Carolina is a vital state in the lead up to 2016. We need to engage and activate the pro-life voters we've identified so that they turn out to support pro-life candidates!

In an interview with “The View From a Pew” program, an Iowa-based webcast, Scott said that in addition to Jindal and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who hosted a “The Response” event in 2011, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley “has agreed” to host a rally and organizers are trying to convince Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to do the same.

On her own program, “Tamara Scott Live,” earlier in the week, Scott said that Gov. Rick Scott of Florida had sent a staff member to the Jindal event to investigate the possibility of holding a “The Response” rally himself and that Jindal had approached Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to ask him to consider holding one as well. Scott also expressed her hope that Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas would consider hosting a rally.

Scott told the “View from a Pew” hosts that such events are needed to save American from destruction, paraphrasing the biblical book of Jeremiah: “If I build up your nation and you fall away, I’ll destroy you…If I’m going to destroy you and you repent, I will heal your land and rebuild you.”

“If our federal government is not smart enough to stick to the foundational principles of those who set this country on the great start that it had by calling on the name of Jesus — George Washington to all the men on Mount Rushmore — if they were not smart enough to understand, then our states can do it individually,” she said on the earlier program.

The Jindal rally’s organizers have hinted that other governors may be planning similar events, writing in a recent email, “There is a sense that God may be orchestrating similar days of prayer and fasting called by Governors around the nation over this next year.” Although the event’s main organizer, David Lane, has allied with a number of top Republican figures, he has yet to name names of governors he hopes to convince to host “The Response” replicas.

Graham acknowledged that opponents of rape exceptions are being “intellectually consistent and honest about ‘the baby is the baby’” but argued that banning rape survivors from accessing abortion is a political impossibility: “Some of us who have these exceptions do so in a democratic society believing that there are some places we will not go.”

“The rape exception will be part of the bill…We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us in a spot where we’re debating about what a legitimate rape is, that’s not the cause that we’re in,” he said.

This post has been updated with additional details of Graham's speech.

Today the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Virginia’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples.

This is a historic step forward for equality in the South. Beyond Virginia, the ruling will also affect the other states covered by the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia, which have similar bans in place. In West Virginia, the district judge considering the challenge to the state’s ban said last month that he would not proceed until the federal appeals court had ruled.

In the majority opinion, the judges noted that bigotry and fear cannot be the basis for the denial of equal rights under the law:

We recognize that same-sex marriage makes some people deeply uncomfortable. However, inertia and apprehension are not legitimate bases for denying same-sex couples due process and equal protection of the laws.

…The choice of whether and whom to marry is an intensely personal decision that alters the course of an individual's life. Denying same-sex couples this choice prohibits them from participating fully in our society, which is precisely the type of segregation that the Fourteenth Amendment cannot countenance.

For those who claim that marriage bans are legitimate because they were adopted by popular vote, the court quoted a Supreme Court case from 1964:

A citizen’s constitutional rights can hardly be infringed simply because a majority of the people choose that it be.

Clyburn has handily won all of his recent reelection bids in the heavily Democratic, majority African American district, something that Culler might not be able to change if he keeps on making birther jokes.

Despite his group’s perpetual financial woes, William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC has managed to scrape together enough funds to deluge 122,000 households in South Carolina and Virginia with a robocall attacking Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Lindsey Graham for supporting immigration reform, Brietbart reports today.

“Remember that a vote for Cantor or Graham is a vote for tens of millions of illegal immigrants to get amnesty, jobs, welfare payments and a vote with or against you in future elections. Remember who to thank for amnesty. Thank Eric Cantor and Lindsey Graham” Gheen says in the robocall, which he tells Breitbart will reach 26,000 Republican households Cantor’s Virginia district and 96,000 in South Carolina.

Cantor, meanwhile, hasn’t explicitly endorsed immigration reform and is actuallyfundraising off the claim that he blocked reform from moving forward in Congress.

Gheen is one of the most extreme figures in the anti-immigrant movement, who has warned of a violent revolution if the immigrant “invasion” can’t be stopped and said that immigration reform would amount to “national rape.”

UPDATE: It looks like Gheen’s South Carolina calls violate state law, which of course gives Gheen another opportunity for self-aggrandizement. The State reports:

State law bans automatically dialed calls that deliver unsolicited, prerecorded consumer or political messages without assistance of a live operator, S.C. Republican Party chairman Matt Moore said in a memo sent out last month as a reminder to campaigns.

Americans for Legal Immigration president William Gheen said his robo-calls comply with federal law. Gheen was not familiar with S.C. law. After reading it, he said he would turn himself in if any prosecutor decided to charge him.

He also said he would beat any charges.

“I feel quite confident in my ability to defeat this in a court of law,” Gheen said, adding he is defending his right to engage in political speech. “For our republic to function, people need to be able to communicate with voters.”

…

Gheen said he has one request for anyone who plans to arrest him: “The only thing I ask is that they do it before Election Day, please."

The President of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC William Gheen is facing possible charges and arrest after bumping into a unique, obscure, and unenforced state law banning automated campaign calls that are designed to warn South Carolina and Virginia voters about how the immigration reform amnesty plans of Senator Lindsey Graham and Congressman Eric Cantor will affect them.

...

"I know that nobody likes robo-calls, but isn't it ironic that I might be charged for violating an obscure unenforced state law curtailing freedoms of political speech while more than 12 million illegal immigrants flagrantly violate numerous federal laws designed to protect Americans from real damages?" said William Gheen of ALIPAC. "A few seconds of an annoying call is nothing compared to the millions of devastated American lives that are a result of Lindsey Graham's and Eric Cantor's support for amnesty for illegals."

The University of South Carolina-Upstate recently announced the closure of its Center for Women’s and Gender Studies following severalattacks from Republican politicians who threatened to cut funding from the school over an LGBT comedy event.

“Congratulations to the University of South Carolina Upstate for having the courage and good sense to eliminate a course of study whose sole purpose is to indoctrinate young women in leftist ideology.

“We applaud the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) for closing the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) and allocating those funds to teach America’s founding documents. The decision puts the South Carolina college in compliance with state law requiring those documents be taught and also gives these women a chance at actual employment upon graduation.

“As American women, we strongly support equal opportunity and are glad USCU will instead concentrate on courses that will prepare its young women for jobs instead of joining their other women’s studies sisters in the unemployment line.

“It is surely more beneficial to learn the history of our country then to take part in pointless gender “victimology” lessons. Clearly, they will miss the “I Need Feminism” campaign and CWGS’s 2014 Bodies of Knowledge Symposium that included “Trans, but Not Like You Think”, and planned to include the play How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less. We think they’ll be fine.

“Leftist feminists love to make fun of home economics, which none of us in the CWA national office actually majored in, but we can’t argue with Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler that it teaches useful life skills. In fact, it’s far more useful than studying Passages of Appearing: Arendt and the Existential Politics of Transgender Liminality.

“In researching this issue we looked to see how many of the women who have degrees in these women’s studies programs are actually employed. Let’s say they weren’t bragging on their post-graduate employment numbers.

“Of those who are actually employed, we surmise most of those jobs would result in other women’s studies professors. Good news for those jobless feminists though, there may bea chance at employment on the horizon if the Senate joins the Republican establishment in the House of Representatives to push for the Left’s hopeful shrine to abortion, the National Women’s History Museum. (emphasis ours)

“But back to the point. Well done USC Upstate! Women’s studies majors may in fact more clearly understand their “rights” and whether they are actually being violated after a thorough reading of the Constitution. We encourage other universities to follow suit and hope other states will adopt similar policies.”

South Carolina State Sen. Lee Bright, who’s vying to defeat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in next month’s Republican primary was a pioneer in this year’s trend of conservative candidates giving away guns as campaign gimmicks. Back in January, Bright’s campaign raffled off an AR-15. And today, Bright’s supporters will get the opportunity to win a handgun…with the extra bonus of hearing a speech from Gun Owners of America director and Bright endorser Larry Pratt.

A GOP candidate for lieutenant governor in South Carolina said yesterday that public schools are pushing a “silent holocaust” in churches by supposedly turning young people away from Christianity.

Ray Moore has made criticism of public schools a centerpiece of his campaign, urging the state to replace public schools with an education system led by “churches, families, and private association” and warning that they turn students, like a young Hillary Clinton, into anti-Christian “janissaries.”

Moore claimed that studies show that “80 percent of Southern Baptists youths are leaving the church and abandoning the Christian faith, and we think all of this is pretty much attributable to government schooling.”

“We think the main culprit is public schooling,” he said. “So there’s a holocaust, a silent holocaust going on in our evangelical churches.”

He also attacked the “viruses” of same-sex marriage and abortion rights:

The pastors go on and on oblivious like nothing is happening and they’re out there preaching against same-sex marriage and abortion, so why is same-sex marriage and abortion and all of these viruses latching on to our society so readily? And we think part of it is government-sponsored education where they’re thoroughly and aggressively teaching socialism, humanism; turning their hearts away from Christ; teaching them evolutionism; Common Core has pervaded the system even in the so-called Bible Belt South; we have sex education apart from covenant marriages being taught and homosexuality is being taught in the Bible Belt as well as the Northeast and the far-west. So the system is thoroughly handed over to egregious and harmful teachings, and it’s just wrecking and causing havoc in our churches and in our family.

His group sent out a statement alleging that California was “mandating that public school children be indoctrinated to accept as normal the homosexual lifestyle and other forms of sexual deviancy” and warning that “California’s schools are now promoting behaviors and lifestyles that are physically and spiritually dangerous for children.”

We can look at the rise of the aggressive homosexual movement in our country, I’m old enough to remember it was as late as 1968 that it was pretty much an underground movement but it has just swept through our culture in a way now that Christians are on the defensive, marriage is under attack, they are teaching it to our children in the schools. We are looking at this and incredulously saying ‘how could this happen,’ this is another example of a tipping point in a bad direction, the rise of the modern, aggressive, homosexual movement and its attack on marriage.

…

In some of the states now they’re mandating the instruction of homosexuality and transgender education in the schools: California, some of the New England schools. It’s just incredible what’s happening and parents just sit there and think if they complain that they’ll listen. They won’t and the best way to deal with it is to get the kids out.

Well, the show may be canceled, but the outrage machine rolls on. The State reports that Fair "said in a TV interview [last] week that Upstate students needed to be exposed to gay-themed materials and programs like 'they do skinheads and radical Islam. They don't need to be exposed to it.'"

State Sen. Lee Bright, who represents the area in the state legislature and who is challenging U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in the GOP primary this year, joined Fair in the effort to cut the school's budget in punishment for planning to host the show and for assigning LGBT-friendly reading material. "I think we've got their attention," Bright said. "Folks in Spartanburg aren't looking for that kind of bent at their local college."

And now, a candidate for state superintendent of education is piling on, issuing a press release calling the show "dangerous" and "destructive" and calling for everyone involved to be fired. Superintendant candidate Gary Burgess wrote, in a press release flagged by the Charleston City Paper:

Sexual orientation, and teaching children about sexual orientation, is exclusively the purview of the home and Houses of Faith. A seminar teaching young adults how to be heterosexual or homosexual is completely off limits to schools, colleges, and universities. How much training does it take to have human beings, sexual creatures, participate in sex? This is ludicrous. This is dangerous. This is destructive ...

These programs, which try to indoctrinate our children, must be completely defunded, and those who use tax dollars in such a way should be fired.

Meanwhile, Leigh Hendrix, the South Carolina native who wrote and performs "How To Be A Lesbian In 10 Days Or Less," says she is "really surprised" by the backlash to her show, noting that "the title is far more provocative than the piece."

Last month, the South Carolina House voted to cut $70,000 from the budgets of two state universities to punish them for assigning books about LGBT people to students. Now, a state senator is accusing one of the schools of gay “recruitment” for hosting a one-woman comedy show called “How To Be A Lesbian In 10 Days Or Less," and has caused the show to be canceled.

“That’s not an explanation of ‘I was born this way,’” Sen. Mike Fair told Greenville’s WYFF of the planned show at University of South Carolina-Upstate. “That’s recruiting.”

Fair added that the assigned reading at USC-Upstate and the College of Charleston was “just not normal” and amounted to the “glorification of same-sex culture.”

In response, USC-Upstate noted that the show and its title are meant to be “satirical in nature,” but canceled the performance, saying that it had “become a distraction.”

Fair was one of a handful of state legislators who voted against every incumbent USC trustee last week in protest. Joining him was Sen. Lee Bright, who is running in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, who lamented, “USC-Upstate has become a place of indoctrination not free inquiry.”

South Carolina state senator and US Senate candidate Lee Bright said yesterday that Republicans should learn from Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in their fight against President Obama and promised to oppose the “indoctrination” of the “homosexual agenda.”

Speaking on Washington Watch with Josh Duggar, the TLC reality TV star who also serves as executive director of the Family Research Council’s campaign arm, Bright said GOP leaders like Speaker John Boehner should have the “courage” of al-Assad and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

He also promised to fight to “take back” the “educational establishment” from the “homosexual agenda” before it “indoctrinates” the “next generation.”

Republicans need to learn to start playing offense and quit playing so much defense. You look at, of course I hate to use examples, you look at Assad and you look at Putin, when people stand up to Obama, you see that he backs up and his lines in the sand become erased.

If [Speaker] Boehner had the courage that Putin and Assad had, we’d be living in a different America, but we don’t have the leadership and we’ve got to continue to try to get folks to Washington that are going to take the fight to the liberal agenda.

One thing I didn’t mention earlier, you were talking about things going around the state, we’ve got the homosexual agenda on the full march in our institutions of higher ed and we’ve gone from education to indoctrination, so we are in a fight — they have seized the educational establishment and we’ve got to take that back and we’ve got to get folks involved in that or otherwise that’s our next generation.

“Gun control has never been about guns. It’s about control,” said Morgan, who runs the group Armed American Woman. “In the twentieth century, folks, 170 million people have been annihilated by their own governments after being disarmed. So, don’t let anybody tell you that disarming America is going to make us a safer place.” The myth that gun control led to the genocides in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union has been thoroughlydebunked.

We’ve writtenquite abitabout South Carolina state senator Lee Bright, who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham in the state’s Republican primary this year. But Bright is hardly alone in the race to topple Graham. Over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend, the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition held a convention that included a lively debate between Bright and his three fellow Tea Party candidates vying for the chance to face Graham in a runoff.

We put together a highlight reel of Connor’s commentary during the debate, including his assertions that the Europeans he fought alongside in Afghanistan were less hard-working and ingenious than American soldiers because “Europe had gone socialist” and “post-Christian”; that Congress should impeach President Obama over his executive order implementing part of the DREAM Act; that the separation of church and state has led “atheism to be our national religion”; and that Congress should disband federal appeals courts that enforce church-state separation because “if you’re being biblical, you’re doing your job as a judge.”

Another memorable moment was when the moderator asked all four candidates to react to Sen. Graham’s former support for legislation to combat climate change.

The first candidate, businesswoman Nancy Mace, claimed that a recent freeze disproved the fact that climate change exists. Bright contended that climate change was a “scam” concocted by people out to make money. Another candidate, Richard Cash – who owns a “fleet of neighborhood ice cream trucks” --was “open to the idea that there’s possibly global warming,” but claimed that there’s not “enough evidence” yet to create policy. Connor, for his part, called climate change “gobbledygook,” a point he illustrated by asking everybody in the audience to take a deep breath and breathe it out, then telling them, “you’re putting carbon deposits in the air and you’re causing global warming.”

And a roundup of the debate would not be complete without Cash’s opening statement, in which he edited Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to be about banning abortion.

Yesterday, we wrote about a speech that South Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Lee Bright gave to a Tea Party group in August, in which he warned that the Obama administration is training IRS “Brown Shirts” to enforce the Affordable Care Act.

Elsewhere in the speech, Bright shared his views on immigration, and Muslim immigrants in particular, who he warned might be coming from “terrorist nations.”

“We got to be careful about who we let in this country. A lot of these folks from terrorist nations are coming in on student visas, and we shouldn’t allow it,” he said.

Later, in response to an audience member who questioned the wisdom of building a “wall around our nation,” Bright agreed, warning, “those same troops that keep other people out could keep us in.”

But, he added, illegal immigration across the Southern border is “an invasion” and “we don’t know who these people are. This could be Muslim Brotherhood.”

A later questioner was less sympathetic toward immigrants, warning of a growing number of mosques in South Carolina and alluding to seeing Muslim immigrants at the DMV. “I am curious to know, where are these people coming from and have we checked their backgrounds,” Bright responded. “Because we’ve gone out of our way to bring folks in from countries that hate us.”

At a speech in August, South Carolina state senator Lee Bright, who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham for the Republican nomination, warned that IRS “Brown Shirts” might start enforcing Obamacare with semiautomatic rifles.

Bright cited a conspiracy theory promoted by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC), who started spreading the alarm in June when he witnessed “IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15.” In real life, this is because the IRS has a criminal investigations unit that has since the 1920s pursued drug traffickers and other criminal organizations, and which during the Bush administration started providing extra support for anti-terrorism efforts – activities which require special agents to be “equipped similarly to other federal, state and local law enforcement organizations.”

But according to Bright, “If that’s true, and they’re going to assault weapons training, the Brown Shirts are next. Because that’s the enforcement group for Obamacare is the IRS. And if you don’t have an IRS, you don’t have Obamacare.”

After Bright presented his theory about the IRS-Obamacare Brown Shirts, an audience member asked him what he thought of various anti-government conspiracy theories, including that “FEMA is training a militia.”

“Most of the federal government is a scam,” Bright said, adding that “FEMA is the biggest scam in the world.”

To make his point, Bright told a story of the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina asking for private donations to help with the relief from an earthquake and getting so many that he had to stop accepting aid – all without the help of FEMA. We would really like to know what earthquake he is talking about that was small enough that FEMA wouldn’t intervene but large enough that it required a large-scale private donations effort.

Later in the speech, Bright claimed that federal earthquake and tornado relief, along with food assistance, were not the role of the federal government and were just being used to “get votes.” We've previously reported on Bright's mocking of food stamp recipients.

South Carolina state senator Lee Bright, who is challenging Sen. Lindsey Graham in this year’s Republican primary, suggested to a Tea Party group today that Congress should impeach federal judges who rule in favor of marriage equality in order to intimidate other judges into doing “the right thing.”

Discussing the recent federal ruling legalizing marriage equality in Utah, Bright told Tea Party Express, “Congress ought to stand up and do its job and impeach one of these federal judges. And I think when you do that, being a federal judge is a pretty good gig, and I think if you’ll impeach just one, the rest of them will do the right thing. And they’ll do it out of necessity, because self-preservation is an instinct that so many folks have.”

Later in the interview, Bright launched into a discourse on the balance between liberty and security, including a rant that we don’t quite understand about how “there are institutions that can put you in a room that you can’t harm yourself but you’re not free, and I would rather take the risk and be free.”

This led him to the topic of gun laws, on which he said the U.S. should follow Israel’s example, including putting “teachers with machine guns on playgrounds.”

"You look over at Israel, and that’s an armed group of folks over there,” he said. “I mean, they are teachers with machine guns on playgrounds, because you got terrorists over there that would choose to harm children and whose teachers are there to protect them. When you’ve got folks that are armed and able to defend themselves, the threat of terrorism goes down drastically.”

In fact, Israel has much stricter gun control laws than the U.S. does and in 1995 mandated guards at the entrances to schools to protect against terrorism. As an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman put it, “We're fighting terrorism, which comes under very specific geopolitical and military circumstances. This is not something that compares with the situation in the U.S.” Also, we weren’t able to find anything about Israeli teachers walking around playgrounds with machine guns.

This week, South Carolina state senator Larry Grooms introduced a bill similar to the one recently passed in Texas that would require any doctor performing an abortion in the state to have “admitting privileges at a local hospital.”

According to one pastor who claims to have had a hand in the drafting of Grooms’ bill, that is the goal of the proposed provision in South Carolina. At an event in September at his church – which it appears that Sen. Grooms was attending -- pastor Bobby Eubanks explained that he planned to “help” the senator write a bill imposing a number of abortion restrictions so that he could “introduce it under his name.”

“My plan is to regulate the industry not to end it,” he said, explaining that regulations such as waiting periods and mandatory sonograms raise costs and therefore make abortions less affordable for the “girls” who are seeking them. “How you get the costs to go up is you regulate it,” he said, telling the story of a woman he met who said she was barely able to scrape up $500 for an abortion.

He also touted the admitting privileges provision, claiming that abortion clinics won’t help women who experience complications: “The girl, if she’s down there and she starts bleeding when she comes out, she’s on her own.”

But he also made clear the real reason he was pushing the provision, saying, “not a hospital in South Carolina” would actually grant the required privileges.

Eubanks then announced that he would track down any legislator who opposed his bill and “stand in front of their church and say, ‘You have a member of your church who promotes killing babies.’”

We left a message with Sen. Grooms’ office asking if Eubanks did in fact have a hand in writing the bill, and will update this post if we hear back from them.

It appears that the two are at least occasional collaborators. On the day that Grooms filed his bill, he joined Eubanks and his fellow state senator LeeBright – currently the top-polling primary challenger to Sen. Lindsey Graham – at a protest in front of a Charleston hospital that provides reproductive medicine training to its residents.

Eubanks has some other notable views about abortion and other issues. At an event in July also attended by U.S. Sen. Tim Scott and Sen. Bright, Eubanks declared that he would “be in jail” if Hillary Clinton became president, suggested that Clinton had Ambassador Chris Stevens killed in Benghazi “because he knew stuff he was trying to move up the ladder,” claimed that “abortion continues to be because people don’t want biracial children,” warned that marriage equality would lead to “Braveheart”-style government destruction of marriage, and explained that slavery was “not about racism” but instead was “an accepted way of economics throughout the world.” In fact, when it comes to slavery, he said, “the real fault lies with Africa for selling their people to slave traders.”

Yesterday, we took a look at South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s top-polling Tea Party primary challenger, state Sen. Lee Bright, who thinks the income tax is something out of Nazi Germany and is concerned about women with nice nails and pocketbooks getting food assistance.

It turns out that Bright doesn’t just want to eliminate a host of core federal programs…he’s also itching to refight the Civil War.

In a series of speeches to Republican and Tea Party gatherings this year, Bright has riled up crowds with the states-rights rallying cry, “If the Tenth Amendment won’t protect the Second, we might have to use the Second to protect the Tenth.”

Bright is a proponent of nullification, the unconstitutional idea that states can “nullify” federal laws that they don’t like. This year, he sponsored a bill in the state senate to nullify the Affordable Care Act.

At a gun-rights rally in front of the South Carolina statehouse in January, Bright stood before two confederate flags to offer his view that while he finds slavery “morally reprehensible,” President Lincoln’s Revenue Act of 1862 – which introduced a progressive income tax in order to fund the Union Army – “was when government started becoming God and taking over this country.”

Later in the speech, Bright declared he was ready to “lay down my life” fighting the federal government: “We don’t want to have to use the Second Amendment, we’re a peaceful people. But we will not be the generation that lost our liberty. People ask me all the time, ‘I don’t know what I’ll tell my children, I don’t know what I’ll tell my grandchildren.’ Well, I’m not going to have that problem, because I’m not going to be here. I want to lay down my life for my liberty just like my forefathers did.”

At a February “Day of Resistance Rally” in Greenville, Bright warned that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor might even want to dissolve the states, and expanded on his view of 19th century American history…adding that it is Americans today who are in fact under “the chains of slavery.”

“I went to public school,” he said, “and I was taught about the Civil War, and then I learned it was the War Between the States, and then I learned it was the War of Nullification, and then finally I learned out it was Lincoln’s War.”

He then accused President Obama of wanting to be a “king.” “I’ll say what my forefathers said,” he added. “No king but Jesus.”

“We have got to be organized, we have got to participate in these elections,” he said. “Because I’ve got to tell you, if we don’t, we might have to use the Second Amendment to defend the Tenth. And let me tell you, I want peace. Listen, peace is sweet, but it’s not so sweet for the chains of slavery.”

In another speech in February, Bright went after President Obama, claiming, “The man has never had a challenge, everything has been handed to him. We don’t know how his education was paid for, but it looks like it was handed to him, and we can’t even find out.”

He then offered his standard threat of violent revolution, speculating that in the hypothetical conflict President Obama wouldn’t send troops to South Carolina because armed forces from the state would turn against him.

“We want to use the Tenth Amendment to protect the Bill of Rights, but if we have to, we will use the Second Amendment to protect them. We want to be a peaceful people, but we can’t sacrifice liberty for peace,” he said.

“I’ve talked to plenty of soldiers, and these soldiers don’t much like what’s going on with Obama. I mean, these are our troops, these are our family members, and I just don’t think he’ll have federal troops coming down here. to South Carolina.”

One audience remember responded to the criticism of Obama by shouting “Vote him out!” Another can be heard responding, “Vote with guns!”